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by Lewis M. Branscomb and Philip
E. Auerswald How do technology innovators, business executives, and venture capitalists manage the technical elements of business risk when developing and launching new products? In Taking Technical Risks, KSG Professor Lewis
M. Branscomb and KSG Postdoctoral Fellow Philip E. Auerswald address
early-stage, high-tech innovation in the context of business decision
making and innovation policy. They bring the reader into the space
that lies between invention (an idea) and innovation (a product).
This, they explain, is the boundary between action contemplated
and an action taken, between what is known and what is not known,
and between events that can be controlled and events that cannot.
It is where individual human ingenuity connects with long-term macroeconomic
growth, and concepts become prototypes; teams become companies;
and today’s technical breakthroughs become tomorrow’s
goods, services, and economic infrastructure. But successful innovations are rare, and there are
many ways to fail. Technical uncertainties are dependent on available
knowledge about markets, since technology will determine available
product specifications, which in turn are constrained by acceptable
market opportunities. So why, the authors ask, would anyone go to the trouble
of taking new science and turning it into a product in the first
place? The answer is that risky courses of action are undertaken
because of the possibility of abnormally high returns, in which
the rewards more than compensate for the risks. The book focuses
on these dreamers and doers, who risk fortunes to try and extract
from the extraordinary richness of scientific knowledge the opportunity
to create new products and services. However, Branscomb and Auerswald point out that there
are serious financial, technological, and institutional gaps in
the U.S. system of innovation, which create additional risk to innovators
seeking to convert science-based inventions to commercializable
products and processes. Also, the pace of development is accelerating
and is changing the innovation system. With advances in science
and engineering, increased global competition, and decreasing product
cycle times, innovators must learn to reduce market and technical
risks concurrently. But in the end, as essayists F.M. Scherer and Dietmar Harhoff observe, to the overall conclusion of the book, there is no substitute for skill, knowledge, and courage in ensuring a safe crossing of the gap between invention and innovation.
Perpetual Mourning Martha Alter Chen In 1987, during the third year of a widespread drought in western India, Kennedy School lecturer and longtime India resident Martha Chen saw how difficult it was for a number of widows in one village to support themselves. At the same time, in a neighboring village, news spread that as an act of her devotion, an 18-year-old widow had burned to death on her husband’s cremation pyre while spectators watched. Called suttee, the horrific behavior unleashed a flood of response. Chen was disturbed, not just because of the burning, which is illegal, but because so much attention had been given to this one case while little public concern was focused on the economic hardships faced by millions of living widows struggling each day. It was this juxtaposition that led her to undertake a field study of the social and economic conditions of widows across India. The study grew into a bigger project that included workshops and this book. In doing her study, Chen found that worldwide, widows comprise between 7 and 16 percent of all adult women, with widowhood highest in developed countries where greater longevity and low fertility rates increase the ratio of old to young people. In India, the numbers are even higher across all age groups, with one widow for every four or five households. Within that pool, Chen even found a huge group of very young widows under the age of 15. The reason for such high numbers, she concluded, were many: marriage in India is universal; husbands are five years older on average than wives; male mortality rates are high; women begin to outlive men after their reproductive years; and perhaps most important, widow remarriage is infrequent. This is partly the reason why Chen focused solely on female, not male, widows. After the death of a spouse, women are often forced to adhere to strict codes of dress, demeanor, and diet throughout their lives, far beyond the actual mourning period. The result, she found, was a devastating catch-22 for widows who did not have relatives to rely on: social norms restricted their right to property and employment outside the home because of their gender, but didn’t allow them to remarry. In sharp contrast, widowed men in India aren’t subject to the same restrictions: they can own property, are allowed to work outside the home, and have greater freedom to remarry. Chen argues against critics who say that how widows are treated is a family matter. “Whether widows exercise their rights to maintenance, property, and work, or received support from others is a matter of survival. There are widows who, due to neglect or violence, do not live to tell their tale.”
Neighborhood Recovery John Kromer S&L 1998 Can urban neighborhoods, particularly postindustrial ghost areas that have been economically distressed, really become revitalized “hometowns” where people actually want to shop, socialize, and live? As author John Kromer concedes in his new book, saying yes to this question may seem difficult when looking at the littered vacant lots and substandard public housing that make up many neighborhoods across the country, including in his own city of Philadelphia. Still, Kromer believes that getting to yes is possible — and necessary — if there is to be any hope for blighted urban neighborhoods, which he sees as the biggest threat to the economic well-being of the cities and metropolitan areas where they are located. Weaving first-person stories from his life and career, including his current position as Philly’s housing director, Kromer attempts to layout the problems and provide strategies so that distressed neighborhoods can recover from what he says is a generation of economic loss and disinvestment. As he writes, in just a few decades, many inner-city communities have changed from geographic centers of wealth to “clusters of economic failure and loss.” In order to turn these neighborhoods back into the desired “hometowns” they once were, Kromer believes that sustained public intervention is necessary. To do this in a meaningful way, he writes, cities have to both improve the physical condition of their neighborhoods and also train community residents to compete for good jobs. Faced with varying levels of funding sources, political priorities, and government/neighborhood collaboration, each city needs to craft its own, unique plan. In doing so, he writes, it’s important for cities to remember that reinvestment tasks are economic issues. “They are different from, but just as important as, social issues such as crime, public schools, drug abuse, and child welfare that are the focus of much of the current dialogue about cities and their neighborhoods.” Therefore, he says, the primary focus of his 10-chapter book is housing because most urban neighborhoods are overwhelmingly residential in character. Outlined and partially written during his year as a student at the KSG (“word-processed at the always accessible Kinko’s”), Neighborhood Recovery is, as Kromer writes, “neither autobiography, insider tell-all, nor urban history.” Instead, it is “part war story, part how-to manual, part advocacy for more effective public policy.”
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